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Another Interview with Joe Uscinski
37 Plays2 years ago
M interviews Professor Joe Uscinski (Miami) about whether or not polling supports the claim belief in conspiracy theories is on the rise.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Editing, Feedback, and Subliminal Messages
00:00:00
Speaker
is that ought to do now add the sting in there now i need to trim out this this awkward silence oh and of course insert the subliminal messages of obedience to our new patron robin i've got it jesus were you
00:00:17
Speaker
Were you there the entire time? Most of it, yes, but that's not important. I've figured out what we can do for a new segment. I... I... Sorry, I thought we decided that last week. We'll be gathering feedback from our patrons, including new patron Robin. Praise be to Robin! What? What? Did you say that? Did I say what? Nothing.
00:00:37
Speaker
I think. Anyway, yes, we can do the other thing as well, but I've just had an amazing new idea. Look, you know how we look at philosophical papers on conspiracy theories sometimes? Obviously, yes. Praise be to Robin.
00:00:51
Speaker
Echo, that's weird. Anyway, you know how most of the people who write the papers we look at are people that you know? Of course. Where is this going? Well,
New Segment Proposal: Philosophical Interviews
00:01:04
Speaker
what we could do is talk to the people who write the papers about the papers they write. Sort of an informal dialogue where we pose questions and react to the answers they give. Did you just describe an interview? Inter...
00:01:19
Speaker
Yes, praise Peter Robin. Those things we already do all the time, will I say, we. Circumstances have conspired to exclude you from pretty much all of them, praise Peter Robin. But still, you must have some idea of what's been going on.
00:01:35
Speaker
view oh dear it's all too much for you sometimes isn't it look i'm almost done editing my into uh my talk with joe you you go play with some colored pieces of string or something it'll be all all okay praise be to robin pal robin who keeps saying that i'll never tell
Introducing Joe Ucinski: Conspiracy Theories Expert
00:02:05
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Yoon Dae Tae.
00:02:13
Speaker
We are joined once again by Joe Ucinski, who I think now holds the honour, or possibly dishonour, of being our most frequent guest expert on this podcast. Joe, as long-time listeners of the show will know, is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, and when it comes to polling and understanding polling about conspiracy theory, and the prevalence thereof, is the expert to appeal to.
00:02:36
Speaker
Here along with Adam Enders, K.C. Klostard, Michelle Seeley, Hugo Drokin, Kamal Pre-Maranal and Manohar Murti have published a new paper, Have Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories Increased Over Time, which we're going to discuss on this week's episode. Hello, Joel. It's great to be back. I want to just say, because of the nice introduction you gave me, I think that you've been interviewing me
00:03:01
Speaker
at every level of my career. I think you got me when I was a junior professor, associate professor, now full professor. So you have the distinction, just like I have the distinction of being on your podcast so many times. I think you have the distinction of being one of the only people who sort of stuck with me seemingly forever. So you get a medal too.
00:03:22
Speaker
So what you're saying is that the next interview is when you're going to be former and now disgraced professor of political science. It could be emeritus or it could be disgraced or former or something like that.
00:03:38
Speaker
We will be keeping a keen eye on exactly where your career is going to go. Okay, so Joe, can you sum up the conclusion to have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time in one word?
Conspiracy Theories: Internet Myths and Realities
00:03:53
Speaker
No. So you can't or they haven't? Well, they haven't. Well, you only gave me one word. Here's the thing, some conspiracy theories are increasing
00:04:05
Speaker
in terms of the number of people who believe them, some are staying the same, some are going down. There's no systematic increase.
00:04:15
Speaker
in terms of, oh my god, everyone's believing conspiracy theories now more than they ever did at some point in the past. There's no evidence to suggest that's the case. I mean, the most simple response I give to people when they ask me this, like, oh my god, don't you think conspiracy theories are worse now than they've ever been? And my retort is worse than the Red Scare?
00:04:37
Speaker
worse than when we were killing people for supposedly conspiring with Satan and drowning them as witches? Is it worse than that? And I started to think, well, maybe not. Right. So I think the important thing is that if you if you go through the media headlines, you see all sorts of claims like it's the Golden Age of conspiracy theories now, or it's now more than ever. Well,
00:05:08
Speaker
I mean, those are very bold claims. They're usually made without any evidence. And I think one thing that has to happen is the people who are making those claims have to be more specific about what exactly they're claiming. Because it could be true that
00:05:27
Speaker
are congressional and presidential candidates are engaging in this sort of rhetoric more, fine. If that's true, show it. Gather some data, show this over time, and if you can show it, then so be it. But if we're talking about the public,
00:05:50
Speaker
in what they believe. It's just not the case that they are wholesale buying into every conspiracy theory that they're buying into, that they happen to see, or that's out there somewhere. So how did you go about coming to this conclusion? So what were the mechanisms you used to generate this result?
00:06:09
Speaker
So we have a couple of studies in the paper. And the first one is that we went back to first the Roper survey archive. So we went through the archive of all these polls that have been taken in the last 70 years. And we found all the ones that had to do with the conspiracy theory and were asked of a national American sample.
00:06:35
Speaker
And then we went through the recent literature and said, what have recent, uh, what have scholars been polling on recently? So we got all of these together into about 50 some odd conspiracy theories that have been polled sometime in the past. And then we went and repolled all of them with a sample that was similar to whatever that sample was. So whether it was the national public or just registered voters or something like that.
00:07:05
Speaker
And we use the exact question wordings that had been used previously. And what we found was most of the, or instead of saying most, I'll say the plurality of conspiracy theories seem to be about level over time. This is because a lot of them, you know, were pulled within seven months of each other or a few years or maybe a decade. There were a handful that were higher than they had been
00:07:35
Speaker
in the past, and there were quite a few that had gone down. In fact, there were more that had gone down than had gone up. So when people say people are believing these theories more, there's just not evidence that that's the case in terms of the individual theories.
00:07:55
Speaker
So if the idea is
COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories: Polling Insights
00:07:57
Speaker
that a conspiracy theory gets on social media, which is what a lot of people argue now, and then spreads everywhere and everyone sees it and everyone believes it, well, that doesn't seem to be happening. And my favorite example of this is with our COVID conspiracy theories. Because right in early March of 2020, we put a couple COVID conspiracy theories on a national survey we had here in the US.
00:08:26
Speaker
And this was maybe the third week of March, 2020, when it was just starting. So we got in at the very beginning before everything really fell apart. And then we repolled in June of 2020, October 2020, and then May of 2021. We don't find any increases, right? And then we started polling more items as there were more conspiracy theories developing that we were reading about. We started polling on those in June of 2020.
00:08:56
Speaker
And over the course of the year following, we didn't find very much in the way of increases. So what it sort of comes down to is that people were really going to believe it or they weren't, right? And it seems to be that a lot of people are saying there's some mechanism out there, usually social media that's spreading it and making people believe it because, you know, conspiracy theories are so tantalizing that
00:09:23
Speaker
if you're just exposed, all of a sudden you're going to believe it. We just don't find that, right? And I think the most important thing is that conspiracy theories spread just fine long before the internet.
00:09:41
Speaker
And Kennedy makes a great example of this. In 1963, the president was shot, and then the first poll was done nationwide just a few weeks after that. In 50, 50% of Americans believed it was a conspiracy rather than a lone gunman. By 1975, this had increased to 80%. It's only come down.
00:10:07
Speaker
to just a few points above where it started during the internet age. So we got it at 56% on our 2021 poll. So the interesting point here is that you don't need the internet or social media for conspiracy theories to get big. And you don't, you don't need, um,
00:10:30
Speaker
these communication technologies for things to spread in order for people to buy it, right? I mean, I think that a lot of people think of conspiracy theories as sort of a top-down phenomena where people see it on TV or hear it from the politician, read it in the newspaper or get a book or something. And sure, those can have an effect, but people are generally opting into those things. I think what we have to understand more is the bottom-up process.
00:10:58
Speaker
I think a lot of people can see a president get shot and just immediately jump to probably a conspiracy, right? People can see something and say, I think there was a conspiracy behind it, right? So I don't think anyone needs to be told. I mean, certainly that matters. I mean, if the president of the United States, who you trust, tells you that there's a conspiracy going on, you're probably going to believe it.
00:11:23
Speaker
But I don't think that's necessary in order for you to buy into a particular conspiracy theory. So the point that I want to make here is that, yeah, it seems like conspiracy theories are believed now. They've been believed in the past. There isn't strong evidence that they're believed more now than in the past. But
00:11:48
Speaker
As much as we want to blame new things for what we think is a new problem, we have to understand there isn't really a new problem. It's an old problem if we want to consider it that. People have always believed this stuff. You can like it or hate it, but it's what it is. And I think in a lot of ways, we've just ignored it.
00:12:10
Speaker
So if you want to get into that, ask me about the satanic panic stuff, because there's something where we know people were buying into this prior to the internet, and they still are.
00:12:23
Speaker
I see the director of the film The Love Witch has recently come out pro-Satanic panics by claiming that she's done the research about that preschool in the US. Was it the St. Martin Preschool? I can't remember the exact name of the preschool. And she claims that actually there really was a satanic panic. So there wasn't a satanic panic going on. There were real Satanists operating there.
00:12:49
Speaker
And the judicial system just wasn't able to prove the existence of the cult to the point where they could get guilty verdicts. So the satanic panics appear to be coming back in style. And we have a lot of congressional people in Congress, congressional candidates who are pushing on this. And we have some potential presidential candidates who are sort of dabbling in the satanic panic stuff.
00:13:17
Speaker
And this is the interesting thing. You might think that they're doing it just to entice their base, because it's mostly Republicans doing it. But we've just been polling on this. And what we find is that for some items, sure, there's more people on the right than on the left. But for a lot of propositions that we're giving to people about satanic-pianic, they're even between left and right. This is something that's just out there.
00:13:44
Speaker
And it's been out there for a long, long time. So if you're a politician, you want to look like a tough guy who's going to protect people's kids, say, I'm going to protect them from the sex traffickers and the groomers and the Satanists. And, you know, hey, you're going to look great because nobody likes the sex traffickers and the groomers and the Satanists. Right. The only problem is.
00:14:10
Speaker
I mean, the politicians are overestimating the size of those problems if they even exist, right? I mean, there is some amount of sex trafficking in the US, right? But it's nowhere near the amount that some politicians say it's at.
00:14:29
Speaker
There have been long discussions about what Satanists are up to. I mean, most of the Satanists in this country don't really worship Satan. They just try to aggravate Christians when Christians try to violate First Amendment freedoms.
00:14:46
Speaker
And there's never really been satanic cults doing this widespread ritual satanic abuse like people claimed. And some people were put in prison for for long terms and are only finally getting let out because the cases were baloney. So, you know, it's the claims that are getting made by people are both false and politically advantageous.
00:15:15
Speaker
And that's a terrible combination.
00:15:17
Speaker
Yes, I think there's a lot to be written about the use of conspiracy theory as political rhetoric, because as many people like to point out, no matter what we think about the presidency of Donald J. Trump, his precursor is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who very successfully with his party, Fidesz, has weaponized conspiracy theories in Hungary as a very successful electoral stratagem.
00:15:45
Speaker
And there's always been discussions about whether Orban really believes the conspiracy theories he spreads or whether he knows it galvanizes a particular conservative base in Hungary and thus guarantees him continued terms.
00:16:01
Speaker
And so yeah, the idea that, yes, some people believe these theories, but some people only express them because of a kind of political piety, or because they're functionally useful in a system, whether or not they actually think they're true, is a kind of confounding factor to when we're looking at
00:16:20
Speaker
the level of belief in these theories, or at least the level of reported belief, which I suppose is the operative term there. What we have is reported belief, and we often don't know whether that is sincere belief or whether people are simply saying what they're expected to say. Yeah, I mean, this is what I say to people. Like when reporters call me and they're like, I can't believe 30% of Americans think that Satanists are, you know, doing mass ritual abuse of kids.
00:16:50
Speaker
And I say, well, listen, you and I are living in these ivory towers. I'm in the ivory tower, but the reporter's in some big corporate office somewhere with the elites, right? And so am I, right? We're in academia and we're in the media. We're not hanging out with the common folk. But go hang out with regular people. And this is the sort of stuff you're going to hear.
00:17:18
Speaker
I mean, a lot of my family believes in this stuff. They're concerned about the Satanists. They're concerned about Disney grooming their children. They're concerned about the public teachers turning all the kids gay for some political agenda. So these beliefs are out there and they're very prevalent.
00:17:43
Speaker
And we could say, is our surveys accurately capturing it? Maybe it's overestimating, could be underestimating some of these views too. We don't fully know, but I would say that the numbers that we're getting back are something of a starting point. And I don't think we should dismiss the idea that some of these views are very widespread and that academics have just
00:18:11
Speaker
drop the ball by not paying attention, right? Because here's the real danger. Because I have a governor in Florida right now who is going after Disney because he says Disney's grooming kids into sexualized lifestyles or turning them gay or something like that. We have a congressperson, a few districts up from me, who's saying almost the same thing. We have conservative thought leaders like Charlie Kirk saying, we need to take away First Amendment rights from all the Satanists.
00:18:43
Speaker
These are becoming big topics and they rile people up. People are taking action on it. There are laws being passed based on these ideas with a lot of public support.
00:19:02
Speaker
I mean, we could quibble about the survey numbers, but one thing we can't quibble about is, are there politicians willing to act on these beliefs? And the answer is yes. And
Conspiracy Theories in Politics: Manipulation and Scapegoating
00:19:15
Speaker
that's the really scary part.
00:19:17
Speaker
is that we're not going into a satanic panic because people's beliefs have changed. It seems like people's beliefs are probably somewhat the same. We're going into it because a lot of our political elites have decided that they're gonna use that as a mechanism to gain power, and they're gonna act on it in very deleterious ways, and they're gonna go after real people, right? Because when they don't find the Satanists, who are they gonna go after?
00:19:45
Speaker
I mean, we already see it. They're going after gay people, they're going after trans people, so they gotta have a scapegoat. And this is what they're doing now.
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah, and it's worrying because, as many historians will point out, we kind of saw something like this at the beginning of the last century, around about the same time, where you had groups in Europe scapegoaping convenient targets, because they couldn't find the actual thing they were hiding against. So they would then, well, you know, maybe it's the gypsies who are responsible, or it could be the gays, or
00:20:20
Speaker
all those weird transgender people living in Berlin. And you just end up having real people being the targets of unwarranted conspiracy theories. And historically, we've seen where that's gone in the past. And we have, and nobody wants to learn from it. And that's the problem, right? You know what's most shocking to me is that when I was going through the Roper
00:20:48
Speaker
archive of polls that have been done in the US in the past several decades. There was very little on the satanic panic of the 80s. Nobody was polling on it. But it was sort of shocking because the FBI was investigating it. It was getting lots of stories in the mainstream news on national channels. People were going to jail for all sorts of crazy allegations that defy the laws of physics. I mean, some of the stuff people were getting accused of just doesn't make sense.
00:21:18
Speaker
Um, yet nobody bothered to poll on it. I don't know. I don't know why. Is it because at the time they just accepted that it was going on? And so there's no point polling people's beliefs about a thing which is going on. We want to poll people on what they suspect is going on. We all know there are Satanists operating in the background. The FBI keep arresting them. I mean, that could be true. And that's the most charitable explanation.
00:21:47
Speaker
And polling was more expensive back then because they weren't doing it the way we do now. So yeah, there could be a lot of reasons for it, but it's just sort of strange that something that was so egregious out there, the people that mainstream media was talking about, oh, there's massive satanic ritual sex abuse.
00:22:09
Speaker
Don't you think we want to know how many people are concerned about it? But they weren't. So I think it could be a combination of what you're saying and a combination of some other structural factors about polling back then. But I've got the numbers on my website. If anyone wants to go look at it, my most recent poll from June shows several propositions that we ask about.
00:22:33
Speaker
the gay agenda, the trans agenda, uh, satanic cults, um, elites in Hollywood and government, sex trafficking kids, how many kids are being sex trafficked. And these beliefs, you know, if you're a politician, they're winners, right? And I'm willing to bet a lot of these people who buy into this stuff are people who vote. So they're,
00:23:00
Speaker
I don't want to oversell this and say, oh my God, it's the end of the world. But I want to throw out some yellow flags here and say that the danger isn't so much that people believe this. The danger is that politicians are activating it and trying to act on it with the force of law. And we're seeing that in Florida.
00:23:22
Speaker
I mean, this has always been my line. It doesn't really matter what the level of belief in conspiracy theories is. What matters is who is expressing those conspiracy theories. Because one thing you might think is different, say, now than 10 years ago, is that maybe politicians
00:23:42
Speaker
are more openly expressing conspiracy theories in the past? Now, that's an empirical question. I'm a philosopher, so I don't really deal with numbers. It would be great to have some survey work done to see whether that's actually the case. But certainly the apparent seems to be politicians are more inclined to openly express conspiracy theories now than they were 10 years ago.
00:24:05
Speaker
Well, the trick would be, it wouldn't be a survey that we would need. It would be, can we go back and get stable texts of what politicians have been saying for the last however many decades and then pick out the conspiracy theories in some sort of efficient way, right? And that would be really tough to do. I'm sure it will be done.
00:24:26
Speaker
Um, because the way people are analyzing texts at this point is, is getting better and increasing, um, quite a bit. Um, but the answer is. I think it is, but I just don't know where I like, we can look at Trump and sure, he used conspiracy theories a lot more than his predecessors, but his predecessors used conspiracy theories at least once in a while, but not a lot. Um,
00:24:55
Speaker
But at the same time, I'll tell you this, I'm from New Hampshire and we have the first primary in the nation there. So I grew up in a state where we met all the president, all the presidential candidates, not just the ones you see on TV or in the debates, but all of them. And there's usually like 50 people running for the nomination on each side, but you don't hear about most of these folks.
00:25:20
Speaker
You know, they're just, you know, people crawling out of the woodwork to run for president and they all run in New Hampshire because it's the first primary.
00:25:30
Speaker
No one pays attention to them, but a lot of them espouse conspiracy theories and fringe ideologies and so on, but we don't pay attention, right? But what's different with this moment than in the past, that we're paying more attention. So I get called by journalists all the time and say, oh, there's some guy running for sheriff in Okeechobee, and he's espoused this conspiracy theory.
00:25:55
Speaker
I said, okay, that's not good, but there's probably lots of sheriff candidates who've been doing this for decades and no one paid any attention or cared. So there's something specific about our moment that is making us care. So we're watching more and we're seeing more, but that doesn't necessarily mean there is more. Now there could
Conspiracy Theorizing: A Constant in Human Society?
00:26:16
Speaker
be, right? But we don't know.
00:26:21
Speaker
We don't really know. Now, this all kind of leads me down an interesting track here. Now, you don't really deal with this in the paper, and I don't think anyone's really dealt with this. But when, and I'm going to say people, and people here isn't jealous or other academics, talk about there being too many conspiracy theories, which is what they usually mean by that is there are too many unwarranted conspiracy theories causing harm in our community.
00:26:47
Speaker
This makes me think of the base rate, fallacy. So in critical thinking, if you talk about increases or decreases over time, you're usually relativizing that to a level you think to be the normal rate that things are meant to be expressed at.
00:27:03
Speaker
And this kind of raises a question as to, is there a kind of natural level of conspiracy theorizing that is just kind of a generic background noise to human civilization that maybe we're just paying more attention to? So the number of conspiracy theories hasn't gone up or gone down. It's just this generic background noise. And yet somehow we've drawn attention to this in a way we never have in the past.
00:27:32
Speaker
I think in general, yes. I think it's always there. There doesn't seem to have great evidence that it's gone up or down. So I'll say it's it's I would say the good news is that amongst the public, things probably aren't getting worse. The bad news is things were probably always this bad. Yeah. So so there we go. And but you bring up a really important question about the number of conspiracy theories. There's no way to measure that.
00:28:04
Speaker
As a survey researcher, I can put specific conspiracy theories onto a survey. There's this conspiracy theory, that one, that one, that one. Then I can list 50, 100, as many as I want to do on a survey, but I'm picking them.
00:28:21
Speaker
And there's some process that I go through for deciding which ones to put on a survey, but it doesn't mean that those are the most believed or the right ones or the newest ones or the most important ones. All it means is I picked them for some set of reasons. There's no real way to know how many conspiracy theories are out there because conspiracy theories are just ideas. So how could I possibly gauge that?
00:28:50
Speaker
If you and I have a conversation right now, we express a few conspiracy theories. Once we turn off the Zencaster, those are gone with the wind. What if we don't ever mention those to anyone again? What if we don't write them down? What if we don't, you know? And this is the thing, is I think your median conspiracy theory dies on the vine overnight.
00:29:12
Speaker
It's only a select handful that get movies made about them, have books written, get news stories about them, get pulled on, have an academic study about them, get more than a handful of tweets. So I think people are coming up with stuff all the time, but it's here and gone. And I think it's only some that we sort of coalesce around and study and see, because we can observe those ones.
00:29:43
Speaker
but most we don't observe because they're here and gone, right? So it gives us sort of a jaundiced view, right? Say, oh my God, conspiracy theories are so popular now. Well, sure, but that's only because you're only looking at popular conspiracy theories. If you look at the whole range of conspiracy theories, a lot of them are probably convinced three people and that's it.
00:30:06
Speaker
And of course, what you might have is a kind of weird situation. You can imagine a possible world where every single human being, whenever they see a strange or unusual event in the world, immediately generates a conspiracy theory. But they are also aware that actually, people don't like conspiracy theory, so I'm never going to express it. Every time I see something, I generate a conspiracy theory in my mind. But it's socially unacceptable to mention those conspiracies.
00:30:35
Speaker
theories, and which point in that world, conspiracy theorizing is at a really, really high rate. But because no one ever shares them, it will get reported as a really low rate because of the social conditions around the expression of conspiracy theories. That's, yeah, that's one very good way to think about it is, is what is the actual number versus what's the observed number?
00:31:01
Speaker
Right? And first of all, we haven't even solved the observed number yet. Like, if someone said there's a lot of conspiracy theories right now, I'd say, well, how did you count them? And where did you find them? Right? So, and if we were trying to be comprehensive, the answer is how did you find all this stuff?
00:31:22
Speaker
So were you peeking into people's brains without them knowing? Were you finding everyone's innermost thoughts? Or are you limiting it to just the ones that are shared in some way? Well, how did you get that? How did you find that conspiracy theory that was shared at the water cooler? And this applies to misinformation too, because everyone's saying, oh, there's so much more misinformation now than in the past. Well, how do you know?
00:31:51
Speaker
How are you able to measure all information prior to the internet and then measure all information now? So all people are doing with these claims is just saying, well, I can find misinformation online. Well, so what?
00:32:08
Speaker
There's always misinformation, and there was certainly misinformation long before the internet. And of course the other issue is, once you start going looking for a thing, you tend to find it. So of course if a reporter becomes interested in conspiracy theories,
00:32:24
Speaker
and spend some time online, they will find a lot of those conspiracy theories. And of course, if you spend several weeks just researching conspiracy theories and you keep finding them online, you may then think, oh, this is a huge problem. Every time I go and look for X, I find more instances of X. But that's
00:32:45
Speaker
an artifact to a certain extent of engaging in a particular research program, looking for a thing rather than looking at the relative incidence of the thing with all other things taken into account at the same time. I think reporters fell for exactly this when it came to QAnon because they were going to Trump rallies and you'd have a handful of people wearing Q regalia. And then after a while, reporters started looking for those people.
00:33:14
Speaker
Right.
00:33:16
Speaker
And instead of sort of seeing the proportionality there, oh, there's 10 people amongst 20,000 at this event or something like that. It's like, oh, these Q supporters are everywhere. And these are all the people I'm talking to. But it was because they were going up and engaging those folks, right? So then when I tell them, listen, I'm polling on Q&M, but we're not getting these huge numbers. You seem to think you're out there. And they said, well, people are hiding their beliefs from you on polls. I said, well, wait a minute.
00:33:46
Speaker
You think on an anonymous computer internet poll, a QAnon supporter is going to hide their belief from me, but they're going to come up to you with painted face and horns and furs and talk all about it for your interview. It doesn't make any sense. There's a juxtaposition there. There was something of a confirmation bias where reporters were focusing on this thing, and then once they started focusing on it, it was everywhere because that's where their eyes were going.
00:34:15
Speaker
And they started thinking there's more and more of it, but that's because their focus was tightening on these things. So that's a problem, right? And it just sort of tells us, I don't think we should be judging what the public's views are writ large just by a handful of people who self-select into a Trump rally, right?
00:34:39
Speaker
Even
Ignoring QAnon: The Media's Overestimation
00:34:40
Speaker
though it's tempting to do because it's, you know, sort of like doom scrolling, but we shouldn't do that. Yes, we made a choice early on in this podcast that we really weren't going to bother with the QAnon conspiracy theory because I just saw us as kind of a resurgence of the Araki Dina theories, various forms of satanic panics.
00:35:00
Speaker
And it just didn't seem to be anywhere near as interesting a conspiracy theory as others we've seen. So it was always kind of frustrating that the media really glommed onto it as a major conspiracy theory. But it does seem to have largely disappeared. I say largely disappeared. Q appears to have reappeared on eight codenails.
00:35:23
Speaker
it may well come back and it may well be linked to if Trump does decide to run again Q is probably going to have another run at being the most popular conspiracy theory but I was interested at the end of the paper you suggest that actually most novel conspiracy theories actually die quite quickly that they kind of they get expressed and then they die on the vine within a few months
00:35:50
Speaker
And Josh and I went through a list of the topics that we covered back in mid-2014 to mid-2015, and we were surprised by how many theories we talked about then that we have no memory of now. So one example was Bo Bergdahl, who I think was the congressman who accused his opponent of being a robot, or maybe Bo Bergdahl was the person who was accused of being a robot by another congressman.
00:36:19
Speaker
And we're going, we don't have any memory of all these theories which were newsworthy back in 2014 and 2015. And even as someone who spends their entire time researching conspiracy theories, I'm going, yep, that I've got no memory of this whatsoever. That's right. We glom onto the ones that are sort of enduring.
00:36:43
Speaker
right, they're still in the news, they're still somewhat relevant. And we forget these little ones that sort of are here and gone and, you know. So if we're only focusing on the ones that we're still interested in, then we've got a very biased view, right? We're sort of not accounting for all the ones that convince some people and then no one's convinced anymore, or at least no one cares.
00:37:10
Speaker
But that undermines the hypothesis that belief is increasing. What some critics of the study have done is say, well, some of your conspiracy theories are old, so wouldn't we expect them to go down? I say, well, not if the hypothesis is that these ideas are spreading everywhere and convincing everyone. You can't have it both ways.
00:37:35
Speaker
So if it is indeed the case that old conspiracy theories sort of die off, then that works against the hypothesis that they're increasing across the board. But at the same time, I mean, Kennedy was 1963, Bilderberger goes back hundreds of years. I mean, moon landing is decades and decades old. So there's a lot of ones that are old that are sort of flat or might increase a little bit or, you know, whatever. So age isn't,
00:38:05
Speaker
necessarily determinate of how many people buy in. But it is true, just as you say, that I can look back at all sorts of conspiracy theories that I've seen in one place or another, and it's like, no one knows about this or cares about this anymore. And that's probably a lot more than the category of people know about and care about this.
00:38:26
Speaker
Yeah, I was fascinated. In study two, you find that Holocaust denial seems to be going up in Sweden. Do you have any idea as to why Holocaust denial is going up in Sweden? That seemed like a terrible result to find.
00:38:44
Speaker
Well, the good news is that it's probably some amount of sampling error because it went from like 2% to 3%. So if you want to have a glass half empty, you could say a 50% increase in antisemitism, but the glass half full says it's statistically significant, but substantially meaningless.
00:39:06
Speaker
And the other thing which I found interesting, and this is probably a more substantive point. So in study three, you go, well, it actually does look as if actually belief in conspiracy theories is kind of going down across the board. But what is interesting is that relatively speaking,
00:39:22
Speaker
Even as it's going down, there's been an increase in suspicion about politicians on both sides of the political divide. Well, it seems to be less suspicion about trade unions and the like.
00:39:38
Speaker
social activity we're not so concerned about, but politicians, even if we don't think they're conspiring as much, we still think that they're conspiring more than the other groups that have been looked at. Yeah, so we asked this question where we give people a list of groups, like unions, communists, capitalists, Republicans, Democrats, and say, which of these groups do you think are working against us in secret?
00:40:08
Speaker
And the total number of groups that people have been picking is just about stable over the last decade. So it hasn't really gone up. But you can see when you look at the results that across different survey waves, sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down for the individual groups. So there are going to be some groups that attract more attention at some times than others that are going to attract more, I guess we'll call conspiratorial ire.
00:40:39
Speaker
than others. So to me, it's just a different way of trying to see, maybe it's not the idea that people are believing specific conspiracy theories more, but maybe they're just more concerned about particular groups conspiring against them. But again, we don't find strong evidence of it.
00:41:01
Speaker
The effect you seem to be talking about is something where Republicans and Democrats don't really like each other that much in the US, so there is something to be said about polarization. It's not just, I disagree with them on some issues. They're out to get us, and that's not good, but that's probably been going on for
00:41:22
Speaker
for longer than I've been polling. Yeah, so that might be an intersection of interests in oppositional politics and also the culture war, which has come into political talk. So you get this kind of idealized talk. And when we talk about idealized talk academically, we say, look, this isn't historically true. But ideally, this is how we'd like things to be. That in the old days, when politicians disagreed, they go, well, look,
00:41:51
Speaker
I think that Joe's a dirty libertarian. But we get on well outside of the house. But on this matter, I have to fiercely disagree with Joe's economic policies. And in the 1960s, that's how people talk. But now in the case of Joe's a dirty libertarian, he's always in a revolution. He's the most dastardly person I've
00:42:13
Speaker
ever seen. I have to oppose his new bill to give Medicare to veterans because of this dastardly and the worry there is actually what's driving the polarization there is actually a culture war between two sides rather than actual political disagreement.
Political Rhetoric: From Policy Debates to Accusations
00:42:33
Speaker
You're gonna have to be very careful how you edit this interview because you got some pretty dark claims about me. So I'll cop to the dirty libertarian part.
00:42:43
Speaker
The rest of it is fantabulous, but that's dead on, because look at the claims people are making now. It's not that, oh, Disney disagreed with me. It's Disney's grooming children. It's not that, oh, we don't like this topic being taught in classes, that teachers are sexualizing six-year-olds. It's not that...
00:43:08
Speaker
you know, these politicians are doing the wrong thing. They're soft on pedophilia, right? So the claims that are out there are just getting sort of really nasty. And I think when I was younger,
00:43:24
Speaker
And again, it just could be because the media wasn't paying attention or maybe people like me weren't paying attention. But I just didn't hear a lot about this in the 1980s. It wasn't like they were saying, oh, Reagan's a, you know, a satanic child leader or something. You didn't hear that, right? If people were attacking Reagan, it was because of his ideology or his particular policies or whatnot. It's fine. But it wasn't stooping to this sort of level.
00:43:53
Speaker
where you're gonna bring a Supreme Court justice up, question her in the Senate, and then suggest that she's somehow in favor of pedophilia. I mean, this is insane, but this is what our political elites are doing, and they should be shamed for it. I mean, this is disgusting. To me, if we're gonna say something unique about this moment, it's what our leaders are doing.
00:44:24
Speaker
And they should be forever shamed, right? And there's a lot of it to go around. And it's not just an American phenomenon. We see it in Australia. We see it in the United Kingdom. We're beginning to see elements of it in Aotearoa and New Zealand as well.
00:44:42
Speaker
It's a problem across the board. Now I've got one final question that I want to ask, which is about the time slices. So in the paper you talk about one of the issues about this kind of polling, about the prevalence of conspiracy theories, is that it's never entirely clear
00:45:02
Speaker
what kind of temporal slice people are interested in. So are they talking about a change in belief over six months, a year, 10 years, or a few decades? Because of course,
Studying Conspiracy Beliefs: Challenges of Time Frames
00:45:14
Speaker
your expectation for the rate of change is really going to change your conversation about exactly what's going on in the so-called conspiracy.
00:45:26
Speaker
You know, so we put the paper out and I've seen criticisms on Twitter and they're like, for study four, he only looked at a 10 year timeframe. And it's sort of like, well, that's a hundred thousand dollars worth of surveys that we provide for this timeframe. What else do you want? I mean, you know this as well as I do. I mean, the empirical study of conspiracy theories really started about maybe 15 years ago.
00:45:53
Speaker
So there haven't been that much polling going on, certainly not national polling. And we've gone back as far as we can go, given what the data allows. And if people don't like it, that's too bad. But most academic studies are like, hey, we've tracked this particular opinion from 1300 until now. It's like, no, that doesn't happen, right? So 10 years is pretty darn good.
00:46:19
Speaker
doesn't explain everything. I can't make, I'm not gonna make claims about the 50s, the 60s, or the 1800s, right? But what I can say is, is that a period when journalists are overwhelmingly saying, it's going up, up, up, up, up. So we're not finding it during this period, right? So we gotta pull those claims back. So if there were increases, they happened prior at some point,
00:46:46
Speaker
or in some way that has yet to be measured or disclosed, but we've gone back as far as we can. For some of the specific conspiracy beliefs, we've gone back 60 years. We've done the best we can with what's available to us. Unfortunately, we're just limited by the fact that in the range of human history, polling is relatively new.
00:47:14
Speaker
And you can only get what you get. I also have to assume polling is one of those because it's a new science. The polls we do now are quite different from the polls we did in the past. So actually, even comparing poll results must require a lot of work. To some extent, because here's the thing, polls always have problems, right? Because if you're doing them by phone, a lot of people are hanging up.
00:47:41
Speaker
So you're getting a non-response bias. Now we're doing them as opt-in, but now there's potentially biases that come with that. So there are all sorts of little things that pollsters try to do to try to make sure their data is as high quality and as representative as possible. But at the end of the day, there's no perfect way to do this.
00:48:05
Speaker
Unfortunately,
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:48:06
Speaker
it's a field in which there probably is never going to be any perfect way to measure exactly what's going on here. But when it comes to imperfect measurement and making warranted inferences, you do seem to be doing the right kind of work. I'm really good at imperfect. Frankly, as academics, aren't we all?
00:48:30
Speaker
Thank you, Joe. That has been once again a fascinating conversation about the state of play for whether there are as many conspiracy theories out there as people like to think. Hopefully we'll be talking again soon and hopefully not once you're disgraced former professor of political science from the University of Miami. Hopefully it's going to be distinguished professor or professor emeritus. Although I suppose professor emeritus is probably several decades away and we'll talk before then. Yeah.
00:48:59
Speaker
Thank you, Joe. There's been a great conversation as ever. Thank you. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor, M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons- sorry. Producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon.
00:49:29
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.